How Palestinians Can Finally Achieve Independence

Nov. 27 (Bloomberg) -- The Hamas prime minister in Gaza,
Ismail Haniyeh, said in a televised speech last week that his
group remained committed to a policy of indiscriminate murder.
He gave this policy a different name, of course. “Resistance,”
he said, “is the shortest way to liberate Palestine.”

So, how’s resistance working out for you so far, Mr. Prime
Minister?

The Palestinian liberation movement is one of the world’s
least successful post-World War II national liberation
movements. At the time of the United Nations partition of
Palestine, in 1947, the world body had 57 members. Today, the UN
has 193 member states. Palestine is not among them.

Blame for this sad fact can be apportioned widely: Arab
nations rejected the partition of Palestine into two states, one
Arab and one Jewish, and instead invaded the nascent state of
Israel -- and then lost to it on the battlefield. Egypt and
Jordan occupied the Gaza Strip and the West Bank between 1948
and 1967 but did nothing to bring about an independent
Palestine. The Arab world at large, though possessing the oil-derived resources to free the Palestinians from material misery,
sequesters them in refugee camps in order to perpetuate the
conflict. Israel has occasionally shown an interest in freeing
Gaza and the West Bank, which came into its possession in 1967,
but has more often focused on keeping a permanent hold on the
West Bank, colonizing it in destructive, and self-destructive,
ways.

Not Blameless

To blame everyone but the Palestinians for their current
condition, however, is to treat them as a people without
independent agency. Palestinian leaders have made a series of
terrible decisions that have brought their people nothing.
Terrorism -- the Palestine Liberation Organization will be
remembered for its great innovations in the field of terror --
brought the Palestinians attention, but no state. Demonization
of Israel brought the Palestinians great emotional satisfaction,
but not a state.

Today, the two main (and warring) Palestinian parties are
implementing strategies that are similarly flawed. Hamas, as its
prime minister says, is committed to “resistance.” This means
waging an endless war of attrition against Israeli civilians and
advancing a religiously inspired, hate-filled, maximalist
argument for the slaughter of all Israeli Jews, in both the West
Bank and in Israel proper. (If you doubt this description of
Hamas’s agenda, please read the group’s covenant. Suffice it to
say that the covenant is frankly annihilationist, arguing that
God himself demands the killing of the perfidious Jews. Hamas
could always change, but it would have to repudiate its very
essence.)

This strategy might actually work if Hamas got ahold of
three or four nuclear weapons, or if the Jews of Israel would
simply acquiesce to their own massacre. Hamas’s arms supplier,
Iran, is working toward nuclear-weapons capability, though it
doesn’t seem likely that officials in Tehran would turn over
control of a nuclear weapon to their friends in Gaza. It also
seems unlikely that the Jews will agree to be slaughtered.

Hamas believes that its war of attrition -- the latest
round of which ended last week -- will eventually wear Israel
down, causing its Jews to abandon their country before the
final, God-endorsed massacre. This is not a realistic
expectation.

The current strategy of the more moderate leadership of the
Palestinian Authority, which controls the West Bank, is less
bloodthirsty but is also grounded in unreality. Part of this
strategy is to continue to argue against the legitimacy of the
Jewish state -- against the idea that Israel is the historic
home of the Jewish people. This argument, aside from ignoring
archaeology and history, has failed to convince Jews that they
are not who they believe themselves to be. (Many Israelis have
also advanced the argument that the Palestinians are not who
they say they are. This, too, has failed.)

Not Unrecognized

The second prong of this strategy is to seek recognition of
Palestinian statehood in the West Bank and Gaza from the UN
General Assembly, the world body that 65 years ago offered the
Palestinians a state. On Nov. 29, the Palestinian president,
Mahmoud Abbas, is scheduled to make this appeal in New York, and
he is almost certain to gain some level of heightened
recognition for the Palestinians.

This is very nice, and it will make Abbas, at least, feel
very good before his imminent retirement. But it won’t move the
Palestinians any closer to statehood. The only country that can
grant the Palestinians statehood in Gaza and the West Bank is
Israel. Israeli leaders are opposed to Abbas’s gambit, and
Israel’s Western allies will protect it from the fallout of
whatever happens at the UN.

There is, however, a strategy the Palestinians could
implement immediately that would help move them toward
independence: They could give up their dream of independence.

It’s a very simple idea. When Abbas goes before the UN, he
shouldn’t ask for recognition of an independent state. Instead,
he should say the following: “Israel occupied the West Bank and
Gaza 45 years ago, and shows no interest in letting go of the
West Bank, in particular. We, the Palestinian people, recognize
two things: The first is that we are not strong enough to push
the Israelis out. Armed resistance is a path to nowhere. The
second is that the occupation is permanent. The Israelis are
here to stay. So we are giving up our demand for independence.
Instead, we are simply asking for the vote. Israel rules our
lives. We should be allowed to help pick Israel’s rulers.”

Reaction would be seismic and instantaneous. The demand for
voting rights would resonate with people around the world, in
particular with American Jews, who pride themselves on support
for both Israel and for civil rights at home. Such a demand
would also force Israel into an untenable position; if it
accedes to such a demand, it would very quickly cease to be the
world’s only Jewish-majority state, and instead become the
world’s 23rd Arab-majority state. If it were to refuse this
demand, Israel would very quickly be painted by former friends
as an apartheid state.

Israel’s response, then, can be reasonably predicted:
Israeli leaders eager to prevent their country from becoming a
pariah would move to negotiate the independence, with security
caveats, of a Palestinian state on the West Bank, and later in
Gaza, as well. Israel would simply have no choice.

This won’t happen, of course. Israeli intransigence has
always had a friend in Palestinian shortsightedness.

(Jeffrey Goldberg is a Bloomberg View columnist and a
national correspondent for the Atlantic. The opinions expressed
are his own.)

Today’s highlights: the editors on the need for a Palestinian
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minister; Ramesh Ponnuru on Republicans’ misguided plans for
candidates; Tim Judah on Yugoslavia’s lesson for separatist
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